


Our thoughts at night

by WritingAfterDark



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-12
Updated: 2018-07-12
Packaged: 2019-06-09 09:23:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15264384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WritingAfterDark/pseuds/WritingAfterDark
Summary: They don't talk much anymore.





	Our thoughts at night

**Author's Note:**

> So, I discovered the tv series on Netflix a few days ago and after binge watching it and realizing that (1) the series is currently threatened to be cancelled and (2) the final season won't return until 2019, I eventually ended up writing this fic to get some sort of closure.

It was past midnight.

The corridors, though they looked empty, felt heavy, filled by the silence that ghosted around the institute at this late hour.

Somewhere across the hall a lock was opened. A figure immerged from behind a door. Followed by her shadow, she made her way down the hall, quick and in sock covered tiptoes.

One door, then another, then another. She passed the forth door to her right when she stopped abruptly. There was a soft, barely-there stream of warm light crawling out from underneath the doorframe.

She had expected him to be awake. Laying on his bed, eyes facing the ceiling in the dark is how she had pictured him. With his mind wandering to god knows which part of their latest physically straining mission. He’d never said it to her directly (they didn’t talk much anymore), but she could sense that he wasn’t getting too much sleep lately. It made him moodier, made him resort to violence quicker, seemed to cloud his moral judgment from time to time.

But who was she to blame him. In her thoughts, Clary had made her way to his room countless times in the past few nights. Not asleep but never quite awake either which left her with a sort of hungover feeling when the sun finally woke her up to a new day. It followed her around. Now that she was standing here, a cool breeze from an open window somewhere making her legs shiver, it felt all too real.

Trying to keep her breaths shallow, Clary listened. She couldn’t hear a single sound from within the room at first. With a pang of courage and her lips pressed together, she pushed one ear against the door. Nothing. Or perhaps …? It was hard to make out the difference between reality and her mental image of him quietly pacing around the room, his naked feet sliding across the wooden floor. A deep sigh escaped her lips.

Suddenly, her ears detected a quick movement from the other side of the door. Clary pushed herself off with both hands, hastily looking to escape the inevitable. When he swung the door open, she stood with her back pressed against the wall next to it. _Please don’t look to the right. Please don’t look_. The lack of sleep paired with the heavy cover of darkness somehow lead Clary to believe that her wish to become invisible (oh how often she had wished to disappear into thin air when he was around) would for once be granted. But as the corridor filled with more warm light, Clary felt the shame of being found out crawling from her gut into her limbs, freezing her in place. She had never come this far in her imagination. She had not once watched, as she did now, with crippling anticipation as Jace stepped one bare foot outside the door to first look to his left-hand side _(please don’t look to the right!_ ) and finally discovered her, presumably looking like a stray animal caught by the headlights of a car. There was nowhere to hide.

Jace’s eyebrows curled in disbelief. “What are you doing here?”, his expression seemed to ask, his lips remaining shut. While Clary was busy reading the look in his eyes, her mind was racing to find the most sane, sufficient _, innocent_ ; the least unsettling answer to the question the arc in his brow seemed to be posing. “Couldn’t sleep?”, Jace offered her half-heartedly with a worn rasp in his tone, as he let himself lean back against the doorframe, arms crossed in front of him. “Yeah”, was all Clary could muster up. She knew it wasn’t enough to change the suspicion with which Jace was eyeing her. A few heartbeats passed before he pushed himself off the frame and turned his back towards her, disappearing back into the room. The door remained open.

 _Shit_. There was a choice to be made here. _You can still go back_ , she tried to calm her racing thoughts with little luck. _You can still go._ But as much as Clary yearned to undo this moment, to return to her bed and forget about ever coming here, she had to admit: she’d made it past the point of no return. And she was tired. Tired of wondering, tired of wasting time, tired of pretending. With one final exhale she too pushed her stiff body off the wall, stepping into the pool of light, and shut the door behind her.

Jace was sitting on the edge of his bed. His blonde hair looked unkempt and he was wearing a grey woollen tracksuit, with the zipper stuck halfway up his front, revealing parts of his ink covered chest. His bare feet were almost touching the ground as he leaned back on the mattress, propping himself up on his elbows. (It looked less casual than it was intended to). Clary was still stood close to the door, trying to take up as little space as possible. With her eyes scanning over their surroundings, she noticed the books covering his desk. Most of them were the thick, worn out looking, dusty kind of books that Clary once had been keen on skimming through to learn more about the world she had so unexpectedly been dragged into. In the light of the room, she was able to make out some pictures, runes, some lose pages which might have been ripped out by accident or added later on. She thought of something to say, something to start a conversation with, that could painlessly ease away the tension building up between them.

“Doing some reading for your book club?”. It was meant light-heartedly. It was said light-heartedly. Yet they both were able to feel the sting the question came with. Jace’s facial expression turned from slight, barely noticeable agitation to a dark grimace. He could have told her that he had been searching the archives for weeks, reading all he could about Valentine and the Circle, desperately looking for clues, for leads, for anything he could find to uncover the well-kept secret of his past. Their past. But he wasn’t going to let his guard down that easily anymore. So, he went ahead and took the hit.

“How’s Simon doing?”, he fired back. Jace didn’t give a shit about Clary’s love life. (Or so he had convinced himself). So why should it matter to her that he enjoyed bringing one or two girls from his alleged “book club” home every now and then. It didn’t hurt anybody. It passed the time and it kept him busy enough to not have to talk to her more than he needed to. Clary’s cheeks flushed red. “He’s doing fine actually”, she said a bit too cheerful to mask her own frustration with a dose of childlike ignorance. She knew she wasn’t fooling anyone. For weeks now, it seemed as though every word they exchanged served as an opportunity to read between the lines. And as the conversations became scarcer the space between the lines grew bigger, leaving more things unsaid.

“What do you want?”, Jace asked. His eyes were facing the floor while not looking at anything at all. Clary willed herself to choose her words carefully instead of blurting them all out at once. Quietly, she took a few steps into the room, until she reached the spot Jace was eyeing so intently. She felt the nagging urge to close the distance between them, to pull him up, to shake and punch him just to get a reaction out of him. Anything but the cold exterior broken only by sudden outbursts of anger that he had presented her with since-

“Why didn’t you tell me? About what Valentine told you?”.

As soon as she said it, Clary knew she had put too much emotion into the question for it to be casual. Her heartbeat began throbbing in her throat as she starred Jace down. He wouldn’t look up. She could tell by the clenching of his jaw that he hadn’t expected her to ask about what happened in the cell with Valentine. About the moment she found out that Valentine was not Jace’s father. Which meant that he wasn’t her-

“Jace!”. _Please look at me!_

Finally, Jace pushed himself up, eyes now piercing though her. “Would it have mattered?”, he asked through his teeth.

“Are you serious?”. Clary’s throat tightened up around her vocal cords. Her voice died somewhere on its way out. The room felt colder suddenly, and she hugged her arms tightly around her torso. Jace didn’t respond.

“Of course, it would have mattered!”.

The words burst from Clary’s lips with the same force she had tried (but never quite achieved) to supress all the memories Jace and her had shared since her arrival at the institute. They’d been buried, far in the back of her mind, where she kept them from resurfacing unexpectedly during one of those restless nights. Now that they’d been set free, flood gates breaking wide open, she felt herself drowning in them. _Jace looking at me in training sessions, Jace flirting with me during missions, Jace comforting me, Jace holding me, Jace kissing me with his arms wrapped around me, Jace smiling at me with his eyes, Jace making me feel like for a second all the grief we had to endure didn’t hurt as badly_.

Hot tears ran down Clary’s cheeks.

“Do you know how guilty I felt? About what we did? About the things I felt for you?”.

Her hands curled up into fists, nails digging into the skin on her arms. Jace was staring at her. Eyes wide open, lips trembling.

“You knew. You knew it was a lie and you didn’t tell me. I thought I could trust you”.

Jace stood up. He looked lost. Too unsure to cross the distance between them any further but too guilty to stay away.

“After he told us about- It all made sense. You never felt like a brother to me”.

 _Brother_. Clary had grown to despise the word. It had robbed her. Of the one person that had made sense of the mess her life had become.

“I know there was something between us, Jace”, she continued, gathering up courage. “Something more than that. And I know you felt it too so why are you doing this? Why do you keep pushing me away?”.

Clary watched him swallow before answering.

“Do you think this was easy for me? Do you think it didn’t screw with my mind? When I found out it was all a lie I wanted to tell you but- “. Jace’s harsh expression changed into something softer. “I saw you with Simon. You looked happy with him. Happier than you looked in a long time. I wanted to tell you more than anything, but I couldn’t”.

“Simon?”. Simon who had been there, who had offered Clary his heart and had watched her trying and failing to give him the love she knew he deserved. “Simon knows that I never look at him the way I looked at you. He is a good man. But he’s not you”.

“Clary”.

With one step Jace was there, loosening her hands from their tight grip and holding them between his rough palms. He was close now. Closer than he had been in a while. She could hear her name rolling off this tongue and wondered when his entire face had started to tremble.

“I never stopped thinking about you”, he said so quietly, so lightly that she couldn’t understand how his words almost made her legs give in.

 _Kiss me kiss me kiss me_ was all Clary could think of and she must have said it out loud because suddenly all she felt was Jace’s soft lips on hers. She freed her hands from his and held onto his jumper, grabbing more and more fabric to pull him close. Meanwhile, she felt Jace’s hands restlessly running over her shoulders down her back and up her arms into her hair. His touch was soothing and exciting at the same time and Clary did all she could do to kiss him and not suffocate on her need to feel his lips.

When they both gasped for air, she felt relieved from the tension that had been built up inside her. Her limbs were warm and heavy. Jace held onto her hips with a steady grip, burying his face in the crook of her neck. Clary thought about sinking into him, taking him down with her in the process, and them collapsing into each other on the floor. But the way Jace was mouthing her neck and kissing his way down to her collarbone, pushing the fabric of her top aside to leave a red and purple mark (right there were she would admire it in the morning), made Clary want him more than she ever wanted him.

 

* * *

 

 His two different coloured eyes were fixed on the mark he had just left on her pale skin, mesmerized by it. Clary recognized the greedy smile that slowly spread across his face. It made her insides jolt and she sunk her teeth into her bottom lip to stop an impatient whimper from escaping.

Jace seemed calmer now, breathing deeply and steadily. He took his time taking her in for the first time since she stepped a foot into his room. (For the first time in a long time). The calmness with which he observed her left Clary feeling exposed, caught in an awkward state between arousal and infuriation. She felt his eyes linger over her skin; mapping her out. It felt as though Jace could see right through her, see how she was aching to be touched by him the way he had before he’d stopped touching her all together. And yet he wouldn’t give her what she was desperate for, what she silently requested him to. He enjoyed the feeling of having the upper hand, she could read it in his eyes. It made Clary furious to the point where she wanted nothing more than to smack the grin right off his face. Anything to make him lose his smug demeanour.

Instead, she surprised herself by palming Jace through his sweat shorts with a quick, steady reach of her hand. She had never played this game with him, but she could feel herself getting incredibly excited by the thought of teasing him, stripping him from every facade he might still be hiding behind, until it was only him. Jace.

The shape of Jace’s lip changed from a grin into a silent, open-mouthed moan before they met Clary’s lips again. This time their kiss wasn’t hasty. Clary felt tortured by how slow it was and how hard Jace was sucking on her lips as they each tried to deepen the kiss. When Jace bit her lower lip, Clary pushed her hand harder against him which resulted in another moan echoing from the back of his throat. Jace cursed breathlessly but didn’t back away. Only when Clary started to rub her hand daringly up and down his length, Jace started to direct them towards his bed.

Clary hit the mattress first and let herself fall back onto it while looking up at the man in front of her. His jaw line was covered in blond stubbles, his lips soaked red, his eyes beaming with a mixture of arousal and affection. She heard herself telling him to take off his jumper and he did, wordlessly sliding down the zipper and throwing it to the ground. The sight made her toes curl in her socks and the heat from inside her stomach travelled down between her legs. Clary had sex before. She had experienced what it felt like to have a connection, to have trust, to have someone desire her body. But the craving she felt at this moment, to feel Jace hands roam all over her and him burying himself inside her, exceeded every feeling she had felt for another person before.

Jace moved slowly, nodding his head as to tell her to scoot higher up the bed while he placed his hands next to her hips. Clary tried as hard as she could not to make a sound as Jace pushed her legs open and let his fingers run lightly over the spot where her panties had gotten wet from all the built-up anticipation. She gasped when Jace pushed his hand underneath the waistband to feel her. Their eyes locked while his finger slowly circled across her soft skin. Clary didn’t dare to breathe. When she felt one of his fingers slowly pushing into her, she pressed her eyes shut. Above her, Clary heard Jace curse again.

When he grabbed her panties to pull them down, Clary wiggled her hips to help him out. In a haze, she pushed herself up, fingers running possessively over Jace’s naked chest. Her nails left traces behind on his skin. Soothingly, she followed the red lines with her lips, covering them with quick, small kisses. Without looking up, Clary could feel Jace’s eyes on her. It made her braver. She hooked her fingers firmly under the band of his sweats and pulled them down. With the view of Jace in front of her, hard inside his briefs, she let her fingers travel across his outline, her touch now light and playful. Jace took in a sharp breath.

Next thing Clary remembered was her being pushed back on the mattress with Jace’s hot breath against the nape of her neck and the weight of his body pressing her into the soft fabric. Jace had managed to tug her top up, just enough to cup her breast with his hand, and his hips started grinding against hers in an agonisingly slow pace. While his hands gently caressed the sensitive skin on Clary's chest, Jace was muttering a string of unfiltered thoughts into her ear, telling her about how smooth her skin felt underneath his palms, and how he had known how gorgeous she would look sprawled across his sheets, and how he had imagined doing this every night since finding out they were in fact _allowed_ to feel this way about each other. _No one’s ever made me feel like this Clary. No one_. Somewhere in between shallow breaths and her attempting to roll her hips against Jace’s to speed up their rhythm, Clary felt a sting of jealousy thinking about the girls Jace had touched and kissed on the very bed they were laying on. But she completely lost her trail of thought when his weight on top of her disappeared without a warning and Jace crawled down her body, letting his tongue lick across her dripping heat, fingers pressed hard into her thighs. Clary tilted her head back and cried out as she felt his tongue rolled over her a second time. _Jace Jace Jace Jace_. She was tugging at his hair, pushing his shoulders back, pressing her hips up while being caught between never wanting this feeling to stop and wanting to finally feel Jace inside her.

“Come up here”. Her breathless request was met with a final sloppy kiss before Jace broke away, his hoarse voice asking her to “Wait”.

Their sudden physical separation left Clary instantly missing the warmth of his hands where they last touched her. She watched impatiently as Jace roamed around his room, aimlessly at first, searching for what turned out to be a box of condoms he had stored somewhere in a drawer. Clary followed Jace’s movements, studying his bare back, his broad shoulders and the dimples just above where his briefs covered his ass. When he turned around to face her, Jace shot her a glance, cheeks flushed and eyes wanting, that dissolved every last bit of uncertainty within her into thin air.

“You good?”, Jace asked, climbing back onto the bed. In an intimate gesture, Clary cupped his cheek with one of her hand and let her thumb stroke across Jace’s lips. She nodded.

It was all a blur from there. Jace’s body on top of her, his steady chant of soft moans and deep groans ( _Fuck_ ) travelling through her with every thrust, the way her muscles clenched around him and her legs closed behind his back to guide him in deeper. Clary remembered opening her eyes half way through, taking in the flush of red that had spread from Jace’s cheeks down his neck and chest. She couldn’t say what it was that tripped her over the edge, but she took Jace right with her, screaming, until he collapsed on top of her where she could feel his heartbeat pounding against hers.

There was a moment of quiet, embarrassed laughter afterwards, when their heavy, sweaty limbs were untangled and they both came to grasp the level of intimacy they had just shared with one another after so forcefully keeping apart from each other for what felt the longest time.

It was well past midnight now. Clary’s head was resting on Jace’s shoulders with his arm wrapped around her waist. Both covered with a blanket, no light in the room. The air was filled with a comforting silence, no lines to be misread in between.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first time publishing a fic on here. Please feel free to share your thoughts on it.


End file.
